Javier Bardem

Spanish actor Javier Bardem won an Oscar as best supporting actor for his role in the 2007 drama No Country For Old Men. Raised in a family of actors and filmmakers, Bardem was a child actor who grew up in Madrid and appeared on Spanish television throughout his teen years. In films his breakout role came in 1992's Jamón, jamón (with young Penelope Cruz), and over the next decade he earned praise for his versatility and his strong performances in the films Boca a boca (1995), Carne trémula (1997) and Segunde piel (1999). His portrayal of a tortured Cuban writer in Before Night Falls (2000) brought him an Oscar nomination, the first ever for an actor from Spain. Bardem works mostly in European films, but his turn as a composed and persistent killer in No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers's film version of the Cormac McCarthy novel, brought him international praise and made him a genuine movie star in America. Alternately brawny and sensitive, he followed that film with two roles as a romantic lead, in Love in the Time of Cholera (2007) and in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008, with Scarlett Johansson).